Your Biggest Sales Bottle Neck to Growth May Surprise You

How do we profitably grow our sales? How do we build business development processes and systems that consistently deliver results?
If you are the leader of an organization and have asked yourself these questions you are not alone and if you are looking for answers this article is for you.

Many CEO’s business leaders and business owners are frustrated. They typically started their carriers in operations or finance. If you want to improve something you look at the data and make strategic adjustment and monitor the results.

However the business leaders I serve often share…

Why is sales so frustrating?

Why can’t sales run like my manufacturing facility?

Why can’t we have inputs that drive predictable results?

Why does sales feel like some dark art and I can’t ever seem to have predictable forecasts?

What I often find is this growing frustration is the result of two factors:

First, the sales team has never received the sales skills training to effectively and efficiently deliver results in their roles. They have strong product and applications knowledge but they have never been taught how to sell. (We will leave this topic for a future article)

Second, the biggest sales bottle neck to growth may surprise you… it is the number of meaningful conversations that sales is having that turn into revenue.

What salespeople are doing each day to find and secure conversations that could lead to revenue is an unknown to many business leaders.

With salespeople on average only selling 20% of their sellable time…how are they using this time?

So let me share some questions you need to know to close the new account sales performance gap once and for all.

1. How many outbound sales calls are your sales hunters making each day?
2. Are they targeting your ideal customer profile?
3. What messaging are they using?
4. Would you book an appointment with them
5. Is the target list up to date with the correct contact information?
6. How many outbound calls turn into future meetings?
7. How many future meetings turn into opportunities?
8. What is your close rate on opportunities?

In many ways sales is a science as I have shared in prior articles.

The number one bottleneck I am seeing today as a sales consultant, trainer and coach is salespeople are not having enough quality meaningful conversations that are turn into revenue.

If you want to improve your fresh revenue from new accounts sales start tracking the above.

Over 20% of organizations came out of the pandemic stronger than when they went into it. One of the most common factors I am seeing is those top performing organizations all invested in training and systems based on how their market was buying. They quickly identified bottlenecks and removed them.

If you need help identifying any sales bottlenecks preventing your team from winning new accounts let’s schedule a time to chat.